The Gibraltar Electricity Authority have released a statement regarding the power outage this morning, which affected most of Gibraltar.

In its statement, the GEA claim the outage 'was caused when Ministry of Defence staff damaged a power cable located along Dockyard Road.

The outage was therefore the result of an accident. It did not happen because of a lack of generating capacity or of a failure in the distribution network.

Notwithstanding the scale of the power loss and the complexity in isolating a fault of this nature in order to commence safe restoration of power, the Gibraltar Electricity Authority (GEA) was able to power up some consumers 20 minutes after the fault occurred. By 1150hrs all consumers had had their electricity supply reconnected.

The GEA would like to apologise to its customers for the inconvenience, which was brought about by circumstances beyond its control.'